ABSTRACT
In the early twentieth century, Cecil Sharp was a prominent English folk song and morris dance collector, promoting the results for use in schools. In a series of publications, he laid out his criteria for the collection of authentic songs and dances: they had to come directly from the “folk” – the rural working class; they had to be old and be “demonstrably English”. He applied the same criteria when collecting and publishing a small number of traditional country dances. He then turned his attention to the country dances found in the multiple volumes of The Dancing Master, published between 1651 and 1728 by John Playford and his successors. He interpreted, published and promoted them as “folk dances”, altering his criteria for authenticity as these dances came from published rather than oral sources. He justified this change by claiming that Playford’s dances had been gathered from rural communities, giving the country dance in its “earliest, purest and most characteristic forms”. This paper examines the renewed interest in the dances and music in the Playford volumes in the early twentieth century by Sharp and others, Sharp’s criteria for folk song and dance authenticity and his defence of the country dance.
